Abstract
Mobility models are very useful in explaining the movements of people
over socio-economic and job categories. Occupational mobility deals
with the movements of individuals over job categories during their
employment periods. Since the time interval between successive job
changes is a random variable, di®erent occupational mobility models
have been developed by scientists using modified Markov and semi-
Markov processes. This phenomenon can be modelled by considering
the underlying factors such as job satisfaction, salary, distance of the
work place, family requirements and others. Unlike most of the pre-
vious works in this area, the present study suggests a new measure
of occupational mobility based on the distribution of wages. Here a
general occupational mobility model has been developed to study the
pattern of mobility during the service life of employees. First the prob-
ability distribution of the number of job changes in the entire employ-
ment life of individuals has been obtained considering the inter-job
o®er times (within an interval) and the associated wages as random
variables. Then a measure of occupational mobility based on this dis-
tribution has been developed. The results are obtained under both
frequentist and Bayesian frameworks. As an application of the pro-
posed model the results in this paper have been illustrated by using
data from a recent survey among the staff members of the University
of Southern Queensland, Australia.
